hot!

When I was younger I was prone to fainting. I remember the moment just before losing consciousness: how your hearing goes, and your field of vision shrinks to a tiny point, like the world glimpsed through a tunnel. Being in Brooklyn like that today was like that. Like a hallucination, a fever dream.

How hot was it? High 90s, weather.com says, "Feels like" more in the 108 range. The streets were busier at 6 a.m. than at 11 a.m. A doorknob in the sun was noticably hot, just short of painful to the touch. I kept seeing the same few people on the streets in my brief forays out for an errand or to walk the dog: a middle-aged woman using an umbrella like a parasol, another with pale green capri pants who wrapped her head and upper body in a beautiful scarf, as if we were in Islamabad, not Brooklyn. This coincidence heightened my sense of unreality, as if the buildings were only plywood stage sets like in a Western and would crumple as soon as I turned away.

It was hotter in North Carolina on a regular basis. But there nearly everything was air conditioned. Mall, car, house, office, Harris Teeter. The periods of really dealing with the heat were mercifully brief. There, I never feared for the power grid. Mayor Bloomberg has warned everyone to conserve. The necklaces of lights on the East River and Verrazzano-Narrows Bridges went dark; so did the lights at the top of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler. The lights in my office were also turned alarmingly low, creating a dreamy, sleepy atmosphere that no amount of coffee could combat.

So far, the electricity is still on. Fingers crossed! I am turning off the computer now.